Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

Four of the armoured bodyguards came in with her, powered up and shielded. They ordered her to strip. Paula obediently removed her own armour. ‘Keep going,’ they told her. She pulled off her sweatshirt, and slipped her long shorts down her legs. The OCtattoo glowed sapphire and jade on her abdomen, a circle encasing a tight geometry of intersecting curves that undulated slowly. Four gun muzzles lined up on the gentle light.

‘What’s that?’

‘Sensory booster,’ Paula said. ‘It’s wetwired into my nerves so I can receive a bigger sensation when I’m accessing porn from the unisphere. Don’t you have them here?’

‘Just get the rest of your clothes off, lady.’

She shrugged out of her bra and took her panties off. One of the suited bodyguards dropped all her garments into a big bag and carried it out. Paula was left standing in the cold concrete cell with the remaining three agents.

‘Not bad,’ one remarked.

‘You wouldn’t need a booster for anything with me,’ his colleague said. The others laughed.

Paula gazed at his blank shiny helmet and gave a small snort of contempt. Perhaps she had given the secret service agents too much credit after all.

A female technician came in, followed by a trollybot loaded with sensor equipment. She frowned when she saw Paula’s OCtattoo. ‘Put her in the chair.’

The malmetal manacles flowed over Paula’s wrists and ankles. Sensor pads were applied to her skin over the twisting luminescence. More scans swept across her limbs and torso. Then her skull was given a thorough examination. The woman took samples of her blood and saliva. Nails were tested for toxins. Even the air she exhaled was sampled for any abnormality.

Finally, the technician nodded at the armoured figures. ‘She’s clean. Her inserts are sophisticated, but they’re all sensors, memory chips, and processor systems; no weapons of any kind. You can take her down to Volkep.’

‘So what’s that thing?’ one of the agents asked, pointing at Paula’s abdomen.

‘Receiver circuitry wired into her spinal cord, just like she said.’

Paula was marched back through the grandiose hall to a room at the back of the house. A lift took her deep underground. She wasn’t at all surprised when it opened on a junction of corridors. Volkep took over, dismissing the bodyguards. He took Paula by the arm and led her to a simply furnished office. Svein Moalem was waiting there, his opal necklace just visible inside the open collar of his shirt. Two other youths were with him, one obviously a full clone with identical features to Svein, just five years younger, the other had East Asian features; the one thing they had in common was a necklace. Volkep was still in his armour, so she couldn’t tell if he was wearing any kind of array.

‘I like the whole underground citadel thing,’ Paula said, looking round the office with its drab ceiling and dilapidated couch. ‘Quite the retro Criminal Mastermind secret headquarters.’ Her abdominal OCtattoo showed her the four of them were exchanging data at a huge rate, all of which originated from the ornamental arrays round their necks. She opened the additional bioneural chips in her cortex and started recording their emissions.

‘Why are you here?’ Volkep asked.

‘I talked to Dr Friland.’

‘Ah,’ Svein said, an exclamation simultaneously uttered by his youthful clone.

‘You fired the missile on Nova Zealand,’ Paula said.

‘Well that’s open to debate.’

‘In fact I suspect your nest is the Free Merioneth Forces in their entirety.’

‘Not completely. My Foundation colleagues are fully supportive in every respect.’

‘I see.’

‘Would you like to arrest them as well?’

‘I might get round to it.’

‘I’m fascinated how you got here. Did you come back before or after the wormhole closed?’

‘After. You killed a lot of Sheldons.’

‘Old concept,’ the East Asian youth said dismissively. ‘They’re all alive today.’

‘Interesting,’ Paula said. ‘Did you know your inflections are the same?’

Svein walked round in front of her. ‘Did you know I don’t care? Why are you here? Even with Sheldon support you can’t possibly expect to snatch all of me back to the Commonwealth. After all, you don’t even know how many of me there are.’

‘True. Did you get hot while you waited for the plane to take off? I did while I was out there. That desert has a terrible climate.’

‘You’d have to send a small army here for that, and even if Sheldon was determined enough there’s no guarantee he’d succeed. Were you sent to try and find out how much I’ve grown?’

‘I don’t care how many there are in your nest. Was the missile heavy when you lifted it up and aimed it at the plane?’

‘What do you mean you don’t care? Why are you here? Why did you break in to my home? Is it to snatch data on me?’

‘I have all the data I need. It was the reason for the Isolation which puzzled me. Now I know it wasn’t a financial or political ethos it makes perfect sense. Did you build the missile here? Did it kick when you launched it? Was the exhaust plume loud?’

‘Not political?’ Svein said it, but all four of the nest raised their eyebrows in unison, sharing the same slightly mocking expression. ‘What could be more political than developing a new kind of life, effectively a new species?’

‘Friland called you obsessional,’ Paula said. ‘I think he’s right. Did you actually watch the plane falling out of the sky? I bet you did. Who could resist that, no matter what type of human you are.’

‘Paula,’ all four of him assumed a mock-indignant expression. ‘Are you trying to provoke me?’

‘Did you feel satisfaction when it exploded?’

‘Two can play this game. Did Friland tell you we’re related, you and me?’ The Svein body grinned.

The Volkep body stood beside Svein. ‘And he was the original,’ Volkep said, tapping Svein on the shoulder. ‘Our minds are rooted in the same ancestor, Paula.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she admitted. ‘Were you nervous when you ran back to the boat? That was a weak point. Someone might have seen you.’

‘Friland originally funded the Foundation from the clinic he used to run in Grenada back in the twenty-first century,’ Svein said. ‘He sold baseline germ treatments to wealthy Westerners whose own countries banned such tinkering. That way he amassed a massive germ bank, a good percentage of the wealthy and powerful people of the day came to visit at some time and have their children enhanced. Their money and DNA were a good foundation for his Foundation.’

‘Standing on Ridgeview station platform waiting for the train, you must have been buzzing on adrenalin,’ Paula persisted. ‘You’d know me or someone like me would have the trains stopped. You might have been stranded there, with the police closing in. No way to get back to Sydney and establish your alibi.’

‘I looked up the records in Grenada. Our ancestor is Jeff Baker, apparently he invented crystal memories. A famous man in his time. A very smart man, too. Friland needed that level of intelligence in his research team, which is why I was created from Baker’s old sperm samples. You, I imagine, require a similar analytical ability. A lot of other sequences were included, which is where we start to diverge, but genetically he’s equivalent to our grandfather. Which makes us cousins, Paula. We’re family. And you always thought you were unique, isolated and alone. You’re not, Paula. We not only share flesh, we think the same.’

‘Were you watching when my Directorate team arrested your Fiech body? Some clever little vantage point nearby, perhaps?’

Svein pressed his face up close to Paula, his mouth parting with an angry snarl. ‘That obsession you mock in me is exactly the same one that runs through you, Investigator Myo. Friland didn’t have to sequence it in to your genome quite as much as you were led to believe. It’s not artificial, it’s you. It’s your heritage. It’s my heritage. It’s what we are. And this is our world. You’re home, Paula. Welcome back.’